Data Storage Technologies to Watch in 2014

Posted on January 21, 2014 By Drew Robb

“2014 will be the year of delivering production-ready offerings along all aspects: SDN, SDS, SDDC – software intelligence will automate the data center instead of infrastructure hardware components,” said Herb Hogue, SVP of Professional Services & Engineering at En Pointe Technologies. “With the emphasis on this space from major players like VMWare, HP, and Cisco in particular, we are just at the beginning of this evolution.”

Software Defined Big Players

While many startups released software-defined storage products in the past year, Everett Dolgner, director of product management, Silver Peak, said to watch out for the incumbents. EMC launched ViPR and NetApp launched OnTAP EDGE. While they are fundamentally different, he feels that they both validate the market for software defined storage.

“Some vendors sell their own integrated solution (servers, storage, CPU in a single box), while others sell a software layer that runs on any platform,” said Dolgner. “Software defined storage is poised to change the way that storage services are delivered, while capacity becomes more of a commodity.”

Recovery-Based Pricing

Backup is another of those old boring stodgy subjects that doesn’t get much attention. Yet everyone uses it and it is a field that is continually evolving.

Take the latest wave – recovery-based pricing. This is a way of addressing data growth in backup, where the volume of data to protect becomes irrelevant. This pricing model is growing in adoption among backup service providers and allows customers who recover less to pay less.

“Organizations have the option of selecting a pricing model based on how little data is recovered over a 12-month period with prices capped so that recovery costs never exceed more than 25% of their data,” said Tracy Staniland, VP of Corporate Marketing, Asigra.

Storage Mobility

Wright of CommVault sees technology that enables storage mobility as a technology to watch in 2014.

“With employees working remotely, more so than ever before, IT organizations continue to struggle with managing and providing secure access to data that employees create on mobile devices while still meeting corporate compliance requirements,” said Wright.

“That is giving rise to innovation around: synchronization to ensure workers can get their most recent files regardless of the computer or device they were created on; and automated retention methods for organizing data by providing policies and rules to automatically move data to cost-effective storage.”